Hearteater

Mare EP

Copenhagen-based Hearteater are all over the genre map on their debut EP "Mare", which usually isn't a good sign, but in this case, the lads pull it off by drenching the songs in a boatload of attitude that wouldn't feel out of place on a Papa Roach album. Screaming, clean vocals, rapping, guttural growling, southern fried guitars, dramatic post-hardcore passages, it's all there in a genre cocktail that doesn't shy away from breaking the unwritten rules of any of the genres.

If that sounds familiar, then it's because rising stars Counterfeit have recently adopted precisely this formula in their expression. In similar fashion, Hearteater go for an attitude-driven style where hard rock blends with post-hardcore and back again with elements from southern hardcore, metalcore and a bunch of other genres. Swift tempo changes, dynamic leads, guttural growls that without warning change into halfway rapped verses that are best imagined performed with sunglasses on (the A7X look), that's the name of the game on "Mare".

Of the songs themselves, "God Within" is the clear EP highlight with its ambitious post-hardcore sound that blends with rowdy rock'n'roll guitars and a few screams and growls here and there. It does sound a hell of a lot like a Papa Roach song from circa "Getting Away With Murder" albeit with more intricate fretwork, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. In the other extreme, you have aggressive metalcore songs like "Morgan lé Fay", which owns a frightening tempo and dynamic leads that echo the early 2000s metalcore scene. The songs in between these two are decent, but end up sounding a little odd due to the band's consistent toying on the genre landscape. A little too experimental for my liking.

In the end, "Mare" is a fairly impressive debut EP. It sounds like a band on a mission given the sheer amount of attitude on the record, and that's a good thing. It's other name? Charisma. If Hearteater are able to translate the charisma into slightly improved songwriting for their debut, they'll go far. Right now, it's still a little too anonymous to stand out.